


Ways to Make It Through the Wall

by tigrrmilk



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Post-Episode 75, depression sucks!!!!!!, what does it mean when the void keeps refusing 2 take you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-03 20:39:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16333061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: But he’s been staring down oblivion of one form or another his whole damn life; so far, it’s taken everything from him but it’s left him alone. In more ways than one.





	Ways to Make It Through the Wall

**Author's Note:**

> this fic has stuff about depression and suicidal ideation in it. because, you know, sammy.

 

 

I think it's fair to say that I chose hopelessness  
And inflicted it on the rest of us  
But at least I've come to terms with my own mortality

**Los Campesinos! - Ways to Make it Through the Wall**

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sammy ends up ditching his car halfway towards the auditorium. There’s a ringing in his ears and he feels sick and shaky and he doesn’t -- he shouldn’t be driving, he knows that.

Plus, for all that King Falls is a small town with more space than people, it’s chaos outside. The electronics have been knocked out, too many cars are on the roads... It’s almost dawn and the air smells like burning. If he turns around he’ll see smoke where the radio tower should be. So he doesn’t turn around.

He’s locked the car and he’s a few paces down the dark dirt track he’d left his car in when he realises that he’s _cold_. It’s May in King Falls and it should be warm out even in the middle of the night. It’s never cold here -- not without like, some kind of stupid magical intervention. But tonight... Sammy goes back and blindly scrabbles at the passenger’s side door. He pulls out the only thing he’d thought to take with him.

He picks up Jack’s leather jacket and slams the door once it’s in his arms, it’s all he’s got left that isn’t in storage or that he didn’t give away, and he’s not sure if it was out of a last selfish impulse or because he thought he might be able to finally give it back -- but now he pulls it on, and tries to disappear into it. The jacket was always too big for him, and it’s certainly too big now that he’s spent three years living on coffee, half a helping of pancakes a day and the last acrid dregs of hope. He pulls on the jacket, and his hands are still shaking, he’s still shivering, and he hopes he knows where he is, because his phone is dead and he has to keep walking.

\---

It’s a long night of walking. Sammy relies too much on Google Maps -- he realised this the last time the electronics all died, but he hadn’t even been clever or motivated enough in the aftermath of that to buy a fucking paper map of the area to keep stashed in his car.

Sammy always thinks he’s walking in the right direction, but he never makes it there. Not on foot. It’s always out of reach. And he doesn’t want to turn back. He’s sure to someone on the outside, this might look like walking away. But that’s not fair; that’s not what this is.

It’s past dawn by the time Troy finds him, his big old truck screeching to an ear-splitting halt. He’s halfway to Big Pine.

“Thank the lord,” is all Troy will say. He says it like, three times, and he’s still muttering some kind of prayer under his breath when Sammy climbs into the passenger seat.

“I ditched my car,” he says, as Troy starts the engine again. He feels like he’s been gargling staples.

“Yeah,” Troy says. “We noticed.”

\---

Nobody’s cellphone is working, so Troy has to engage a truly retro phone-tree kind of situation to let people know that Sammy’s safe. First off he calls Ron at the bait shop, but Ron is still out in his own truck somewhere, maybe looking for Sammy, maybe checking in on one of his many other responsibilities. Then he calls Ben’s mom, because Ben’s apartment doesn’t have a landline. She’s not sure where Ben is, but says she’ll pass it on. Next, it’s Emily’s family. Then it’s Tim Jensen, and then it’s leaving a note for Lily at her motel.

“I think I’ve got the message out,” Troy says, and slowly stretches and yawns.

For like the millionth time, Sammy feels himself saying, in his dullest voice, “I’m so, so sorry for all of this, Troy. I didn’t--”

and just like every other time, he trails off. he didn’t what? He didn’t know that things would get this fucked up? _He didn’t mean it?_ Or had he just really, really hoped that the void would accept him, swallow him, and he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this aftermath.

\---

The thing is, though. Both things can be true. When he was on the doorstep, closer than anyone had made it and survived before, he could feel that Jack was there. He could feel Jack, and he wanted to be with him. The void felt like -- it felt like a sliver of nothing in comparison to that. He needed in. He needed to be taken. Nothing else mattered.

But when the void refused him, shut the door in his face, and he thought he might get swallowed up by some other kind of darkness anyway? When he thought he’d run out of time and he wasn’t even going to get to be whole and at peace at the end of it? He’d thought -- _no, no, I didn’t mean this. I want to fix it, I want to sign the damn paperwork, I want to fix everything. I want to try. But I can’t._ _That option is no longer available_. It was freeing having the choice taken from him; but it was also wrenching. _I made my choice, and it was the wrong fucking one_. Now he had to see how it played out.

When the rainbow lights had left him alone -- when for the second time that night he’d faced down the end and somehow survived it -- suddenly he had all the choice back and his convictions scared him. He knew that he wanted to stay, that he wanted to try. That he wanted to fight -- that he wanted to _make a life_.

And now there was no reason he couldn’t do that except for his own damned self.

\---

So what’s the first thing Sammy did? Left his car and just walked into the night, shaking.

\---

Troy refuses to make Sammy more coffee after the first cup, and Loretta keeps trying to make him eat, like, food you’d give a sick kid - a bowl of cornflakes with way too much sugar on them, saltines, a sliced-up apple, then a sliced-up pear.

Troy wants Sammy to sleep, and Loretta wants him to eat, and he can’t imagine being able to do either. Until he finds that he’s finished almost all of the fruit, and he’s licking pear juice from his thumb. And the ringing in his ears has been replaced by the slight hum of sleepiness, and occasional _actual_ ringing from the big plastic landline Troy and Loretta keep in the hallway at the front of their house.

By late morning, Sammy is half asleep on the couch with their cat splayed across his chest, her claws sticking into Jack’s jacket. He doesn’t care -- it’s scratched all over. Jack liked cats, anyway.

\---

Whenever Sammy apologises, Troy gets this real pained look on his face and says “Ain’t nothing to apologise for. Just glad I found you when I did.” Sammy hates it. So he stops looking at him when he does it, but he doesn’t stop apologising.

\---

People get back in touch with Troy and Loretta as the day passes by. Sammy’s drifting in and out of consciousness when he hears Loretta shrieking “Ron Begley, you wash out your damned mouth!” into the phone, followed by a peal of laughter that he assumes means she’s as charmed by Ron as everyone else in town who isn’t _extremely evil_ is.

“Ron got back home OK,” he croaks out a while later, when Troy checks in on him and tries to give him another pillow.

Sammy doesn’t need another pillow. But Troy looks kind of sad holding it, so he takes it from him and hugs it awkwardly just below where the cat is still sleeping. She yawns and Sammy pulls a face. Her breath stinks.

“Seems so,” Troy says. “Sounds like there’s some chaos out in town, but nothing Ron can’t handle.”

There’s wistfulness in his tone. “I’ll be OK,” Sammy says. “I’m just going to sleep here. If you want to go and help everyone, you know?” It must be burning Troy up inside, all of his -- _their_ \-- friends are probably out trying to solve this mess, and he’s stuck inside on babysitting duty.

Troy smiles. “I know you will,” he says. “Was thinking I’d check up on...” he pauses for a while, searching Sammy’s face. “The station,” he says, finally.

Sammy waves him away. “Get out of here,” he says. “Don’t worry about me.”

\---

Loretta’s next door helping their elderly neighbours get their old wind-up radio working (with the local AM station knocked out they need help finding a replacement news station)  when the phone rings again. It’s only early afternoon and Sammy has slept some but his muscles ache with tiredness when he tries to sit up. The cat -- Sammy can’t believe he can’t remember her name, he’s always _loved cats_ \-- hisses as he moves and by the time he’s standing up... the phone has stopped ringing.

“Hey, girl,” Sammy says, and pats the cat on the head. As he leans down to scratch her behind the ear, she jumps onto his shoulder, and a second later the phone starts to ring again.

Sammy jumps, startled by the first ring. Troy’s cat does not appreciate it.

“Hello -- ouch, _motherfucker_ ,” Sammy says, as he answers. It’s not his most inviting greeting. But he’s got practice at that.

“ _Sammy_?” It’s Ben. Oh, god. “Are you OK? Are you hurt? I just got back here, and my mom said she thought they’d found you but she wasn’t sure where you were! Are you hurt? Where are you?”

Sammy takes a deep breath. “Ben, you called Troy’s house. I’m at Troy’s house. Troy’s megalomaniac of a pet cat just scratched me.”

Ben makes a strangled noise. “You’re at _Troy’s_? Dude, I’ve been looking for you all over.”

“You need to engage more regularly with your local emergency phone tree,” Sammy says. “Step one in the activist handbook, dude.” The words feel kind of hollow, but in a funny way, he means it. Ben can’t vanish on him. He needs him.

“Can I come get you. See you, I mean.” It’s not really a question.

“ _Please_.” Sammy answers anyway.

\---

Sammy thinks a lot about one time he picked Jack up from the airport. Nobody knew about them, and it wasn’t like they were making out in arrivals. Jack’s hair was kind of stringy and unwashed and he was tired because the person next to him had talked at him about the NBA playoffs the whole way from DC.

Sammy had never seen anything, anyone, so beautiful in his whole damn life. It had been like two weeks of business meetings for Jack and two weeks of misery and soul-crushing on-air bullshit with macho guests for Sammy. But it had been more than that -- it had been an empty house, instant ramen for breakfast and toast for dinner. It was scary to Sammy how quickly he reverted to depression food when Jack was gone, how quickly he forget how to sleep and take care of himself.

He wasn’t thinking about any of that right then, though. He was just thinking about how glad he was to see Jack, how glad he was that Jack had come home, back to him. And then Jack had hugged him, so fucking tightly, in public, and he didn’t care, in that second he truly didn’t care, and it hurt to let go.

That night in bed, Jack said, in a strangled voice, “Next time I fly, you’re coming with me.”

\---

Sammy is making himself more coffee when Ben gets there. Troy and Loretta never lock their front door and Ben doesn’t knock, he just flings the door open and practically jumps on Sammy.

“You’re OK,” he says, into Sammy’s shoulder. “I hate you, I love you so much, I’m so glad you’re OK.”

“Hey, hey,” Sammy says, stroking the top of his head. “I thought you’d be up at the station today, assessing the damage.”

“Are you _fucking_ kidding me?” Ben says, stepping back and flinging his hands in the air. Sammy pours them both some coffee and puts two spoons of sugar into Ben’s cup. But his voice falters slightly as he says, “nobody -- we don’t know what happened to Chet. He’s not _there_. But I don’t care about _the station_. I’ve been looking for _you_ everywhere, man.”

“It got really dark and I was shaking so hard,” Sammy says. “I left my car, I don’t know where it is.”

“Yeah, we found it,” Ben says. “Thanks for that, another entry into the list of the most terrifying moments of my life.”

“Can’t crack the top five,” Sammy says, and this time he reaches out for Ben again, and Ben wraps his arms tightly around him like he doesn’t want to let go.

“I like this jacket,” Ben says, after a long silent minute. “Way too big for you, man.” Sammy knows; he’s not short, but he’s not built like Jack was.

“It’s not mine,” Sammy says. “I’m borrowing it.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Ben says. “You’re usually more like, flannel and denim.”

“Look,” Sammy says. “I’m sorry. I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry.”

“If you apologise again I’m going to kill you,” Ben says. “But I know how you can make it up to me.”

“I’m here,” Sammy says. It hurts to say, and his throat feels more scratchy as he says, “I don’t want to go. Not now. Not now that I know.”

“And you didn’t know before?” Ben says.

Sammy doesn’t know how to answer that. It doesn’t really matter.

\---

Emily doesn’t come over that night. When Ben asks Sammy if he wants to pick anything up at his place, Sammy hesitates. “You know my lease was up,” he says.

“Your car was empty, man,” Ben says. “What, it’s in storage?”

Some of it is. Mostly Jack’s stuff.

“Sure,” Sammy says. “I don’t need it tonight.”

When they get to Ben’s apartment, Sammy finds a pile of contracts stacked underneath Ben’s ancient coffee machine. When Ben is in the bathroom, Sammy finally signs one, and leaves it on the kitchen counter for Ben to find.

That night, Sammy and Ben fall asleep, fully-clothed, on top of Ben’s bed. It’s not what Sammy’s used to; but Ben’s breathing helps him. When he dreams, he dreams of the void. But he’s been staring down oblivion of one form or another his whole damn life; so far, it’s taken everything from him but it’s left _him_ alone. In more ways than one. He’s not got so much as a scratch on him from it; the cat drew more blood. Maybe he can hang on a while longer.

What’s wrong with him that oblivion just won’t come? Or maybe the question is: what does it mean that I keep surviving? If I’m still here, does that mean something? Does it matter either way? Can I make it matter?

Maybe some of what he’s lost will come back to him. But maybe something more will accrue. In spaces he didn’t know were empty, or that he didn’t know could ever be filled in. With all sorts of strange things, beautiful things, in unfamiliar shapes. Like two bodies sharing a bed for the first time. Like the smell of pine trees in the forest, you’d never get that back home. Like sliced up fruit, like loans being repaid long after he’d forgotten about them. Like friends he never planned to make. A hand curled around his waist, not meaning anything by it but _I want to be close to you_.

**Author's Note:**

> pls come and cry about sammy stevens with me over at [tumblr](https://alwaysalreadyangry.tumblr.com/)


End file.
